When It’s Good, It’s Good, When It’s BAD, It’s Better…

Best of The BAD: NYC 101

Another ‘Best of’ this was originally posted this past summer after reading an article in the NYTs about twin blonde-haired sisters trying to “make it” in NYC as college grads. The article, aside from making me shake with rage, seemed to be sympathetic towards two white chicks living on the UWS, spending their days baking cookies and hanging out in Starbucks waiting for oppertunity to just waltz right in through the front door.

As a former NYer, who literally had to eat cat food off of crackers for sustenance at one point, I thought I’d inject my feelings on the article, which was originally title “Surviving NYC”. So here it is, rebroadcast for your enjoyment.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go give my wife the wake up pipe.

Enjoy.

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It seems that nothing much in the news or in the world has gotten me very fired up lately. Boston sports is pretty much a numb limb; an arm lifted high for so long that the blood’s drained out of it, and the body proper can no longer tell what the fingers are doing. Politicians from both sides of the political spectrum have been sniping at each other with the typical deft of an over grown four year old. A war toils on in a waste land, etc etc etc.

So this morning – Sunday – I was flipping through the Times, when I came across this article.

If you don’t want to wade through three pages of mind numbing and frustrating bullshit, I’ll sum it up for you. The Barry Twins, Kristie and Katie (aww) have been “struggling” to find long-term work in NYC for the last 18 months, and are starting to get discouraged by their lack of results.

Freshly out of college, the Ohio transplants have degrees in Journalism, which is akin to having a degree in Latin or VCR Repair. It’s a useless degree in a field that shrinks daily in size like a puddle under the sun. They aspire to be sports broadcasters, tv talk show hosts, or anything else related in the field. According to the article they’re “flexible.”

They’ve submitted untold resumes along with freshly baked cookies. They sit in bars or Starbucks, whining about how ‘tough” getting work in NYC is.

I don’t know where to begin.

I’ve read the article three times now, and each time I get a little more bullshit. The first time I read through this slapped together feature piece, I thought it was a satire; some fiction to help illustrate the effects of our economy and rising unemployment rates on college kids finally entering the real world. The Twins share an apartment with their college-attending brother and his artist friend on the Upper West Side to the tune of nearly 3000 dollars a month. One of the twins works three nights a week as a bar tender and rakes in 800 bucks. The other used to bar tend, before getting fired for keeping the music “too loud.” Now they spend their days browsing job posts on craigslist, sucking down 6 dollar Starbucks coffees, and playing the saxophone on subway platforms not for change, but for business cards.

It’s almost adorable, the naivety.

The second and third times I read through the article, I was just making myself more and more upset and flustered. I mean, really girls? You pull in 800 bucks a week, working three nights at a bar, and you’re not even really cute. You should count your blessings on that alone, where the average 24 year old out-of-towner probably pulls in a fraction of that amount busting his or her ass at three jobs for a total of 60 hours a week. I should know, because I used to be one of those 24 year olds.

The UWS apartment? It’s a “cozy, fourth floor walk up.” I lived in East Bumfuck Queens in a 1000 dollar a month hole in the ground with slits for windows that had a total square footage of a public bathroom, and smelled just as bad. Starbucks and drinks at the bar? I ate cat food off of saltines for a period of time, because I had no money.

I actually considered mugging people.

The Twins come up with cutesy ideas to try to get noticed, like sending home-made cookies with resumes, and the aforementioned sax playing for business cards. Bitches, lesson one about living in NYC: Cute doesn’t cut it. NYC is the majors, it’s serious chemistry with all the charm of a dead hooker. People literally live and die by the decisions they make in that terrible gray piss-soaked metropolis, and you’re sending cookies to HR reps?

Here’s how that’s likely going over:

HR Rep: Hey, what the fuck are these? (smells) Cookies? And what’s this they’re stuck to, a resume? Huh, not much on here to work with. Well, I guess I’ll stick these in the break room, maybe someone will eat them.

Girls, don’t whine that in 18 months you’re not getting any bites on that ‘dream job.’ ESPN is not going to come knocking down your door because you’re the next best thing since white bread. You have to work and earn your place in the pecking order of NYC, you are owed literally nothing. Yes, you have friends, according to the article, that hook you up in various ways, so utilize that. It’s called “networking.” You meet people who know people and you keep adding them to that list. You don’t sit on your ass all day baking treats and scanning job listings online. You beat the pavement, you wear second hand clothes and you sure as hell don’t live ON THE UPPER WEST SIDE!

I’m almost willing to bet that they won’t even look for work outside of Manhattan. I bet they’ve never been to Queens. They went to Brooklyn to check out a trendy hipster bar, once. And they probably took a cab.

The comment thread has been 50/50 where people are either supportive of the girls, or bleakly realistic. A lot of would-be NYers, (like myself) have weighed in with their own experiences, detailing how the city eats people alive.

Again, I did three years, one of which I was pretty much on my own. I started off by staying at a dorm while I was taking classes near Fordham, then moved into a two bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with two other guys I knew from school. I basically turned the living room into my own room, which sucked because every morning I had to turn it back into a living room again. When that situation fizzed out about two years later, I got the aforementioned apartment in Queens while picking up work at a generic office building. I had my own little broom closet sized office and I wore a suit every day to the tune of 11 bucks an hour with no health insurance.

But it all came to an end and I realized I couldn’t do ‘this’ anymore so I packed my shit and went back home. And here we are today.

I admire these girls for having the balls to at least try, and I don’t necessarily blame them for being so utterly naive. There’s no class in college that breaks it down for soon-to-be-grads. No one to stand there and be like “oh hey, by the way, this degree isn’t going to mean jack shit in the real world. You’re going to be bussing tables til you’re about 29, so try to keep your head up.”

NYC is for self starters and these girls certainly have the potential, however they need to head in the right direction and pay their dues. There’s doctors and lawyers who have been living in NYC for the better part of twenty years who don’t have an UWS apartment.

My advice to The Twins: Dye your hair brown, cut out the cutesy self entitled bullshit, stop going to Starbucks (coffee at the diner down the block is like 65 cents, there’s little to no waiting, and you won’t be surrounded by smug assholes. This is where the real NYC winners tend to gravitate towards. Starbucks is for tourists and college kids), and start getting guys to buy your drinks for you at bars. You’re both female; there’s no reason why any woman in New York City should be buying their own drinks, unless she’s an ultra feminist lesbian.

Move to Brooklyn, there’s plenty of nice places for half of what you’re paying in rent, close enough to the city that you’ll be actually forced to take a bus some places. And for the love of Christ, stop sending out cookies with resumes.

Jim is a student of Gonzo Journalism, and the overly opinionated author finds censorship loathsome. Aiding him in his fight to ‘tell it how it is, to you people’ are trusty-yet-beleaguered editors, and an often on break fact checking team.